The NYT has an interesting piece on Topix, an online news aggregator and bulletin board that has been kicking around for a decade, but never really caught on in urban centers. But in rural, small town America — where casting aspersions is a way of life — it's flourishing as the hot place to post shit about your friends and neighbors. Like the ones you run into at Dee's Place, for example, a diner in Mountain Grove, Missouri.

A waitress, Pheobe Best, said that the site had provoked fights and caused divorces. The diner's owner, Jim Deverell, called Topix a "cesspool of character assassination." And hearing the conversation, Shane James, the cook, wandered out of the kitchen tense with anger. His wife, Jennifer, had been the target in a post titled "freak," he said, which described the mother of two as, among other things, "a methed-out, doped-out whore with AIDS."

Topix CEO Chris Tolles says the site has a dedicated and growing following within the "feud states" — which you can familiarize yourselves with in the final installments of our Worst States Poll — and notes that one of the most heavily trafficked Topix forums is the Pikeville, Ky., home of the Hatfield and McCoys.